Last night I was searching for a domain name for a new personal project that I would like to kick off. Personally, I don't find searching for a new domain name a fun thing to do. I wanted to see if I could find a domain name which is made up of a combination of words. Some of these include the terms tech, cloud, river, stream, sphere, and many others. As I started my search, I quickly came up with domain names that were already taken. I then decided to look at synonyms for some of these terms. It was at this point that I noticed something peculiar about the word "cloud". This is not a serious post, but just a bit of fun, so check this out:

Following on from my original vRetreat blog post, I thought it would make sense to report on some of the technical IT discussions that happened on the day, For this blog post, I am going to be focusing on the presentation by Darren Swift from Zerto.

So who and what is Zerto? Well, as started on the "About Zerto" page on their website, "Zerto provides enterprise-class disaster recovery and business continuity software specifically for virtualised datacenters and cloud environments."

In simple terms, Zerto provides hypervisor-level replication and automation with no hypervisor vendor-specific lock-in. It provides continuous replication (no snapshots) of virtual machines between hypervisors and replaces traditional array-based replication solutions that were not built to deal with virtualised environments.

So during the keynote at VMworld in Barcelona on Tuesday morning, 18 October 2016, VMware showed a demo of how a VMware Cloud infrastructure is stood up in AWS and following that, showed how a virtual machine was migrated with vMotion into the AWS hosted VMware Cloud. This seemed impressive. However, something’s been bothering me and I’ve been to the VMware booth to get an answer but came up short.

The question I have is around processor architecture. If I’m running Intel in my local vSphere environment and AWS/VMware decided to run AMD in the VMware Cloud on AWS, how would you get that vMotion migration to work? It can’t right?

Is there an option to select the processor vendor for the newly deployed VMware Cloud on AWS?

VMware announced vCloud Express™ at VMworld 2009. vCloud Express allows for the provisioning of infrastructure on-demand. Unlike conventional hosting, services running inside the cloud provided by vCloud Express services are charged for by the hour. This is paid for by credit card. The credit card details are taken upon registering for a vCloud Express account with a service provider that provides vCloud Express services.

Service providers who will provide vCloud Express services, will display the VMware Virtualized™ logo on the website. This is because VMware vCloud Express™ essentially runs on vSphere and it therefore ensures compatibility with VMware environments on external as well as internal clouds.

With vCloud Express™, service providers can now provide a fast and cost-effective solution for their customers to gain on-demand access to a VMware Virtualized™ environment. Virtual Machines can be easily and quickly be deployed. This is especially useful for application development and testing. As vCloud Express™ runs on vSphere 4, it also supports all the guest operating systems that vSphere 4 supports. From registration to deploying machines, vCloud Express™ is fully web based.

Terremarks’s implementation of VMware vCloud Express™ was demonstrated on stage at VMworld 2009. The demonstration was quick and easy and demonstrated just how easy vCloud Express™ makes it for clients to register for the service and provision a server in minutes.

Although still in Beta, the following service providers are currently offering vCloud Express™ services: